Titanic Hearts
by Magi Silverwolf
Summary: A year and a day can be a long time or it can pass in the blink of an eye. (HC fill; MC4A fill)


**Disclaimer:** I do not own the original canon nor am I making any profit from writing this piece. All works are accredited to their original authors, performers, and producers while this piece is mine. No copyright infringement is intended. I acknowledge that all views and opinions expressed herein are merely my interpretations of the characters and situations found within the original canon and may not reflect the views and opinions of the original author(s), producer(s), and/or other people.

 **Warnings:** This story may contain material that is not suitable for all audiences and may offend some readers. This particular piece deals with the aftermath of a war and has references to two character deaths. Please exercise understanding of personal boundaries before and during reading.

 **Author's Note(s):** I love the concept of Harry Potter as the Master of Death and the idea that Albus was completely wrong about everything about it. I also like the idea of magical bonds having a permanent effect and potentially deadly one if one of the bondmates die.

 ** **Notice:**** This story had been previously published in a collection in which it didn't belong. It is now being published as standalone story. Any competition-centric notes that are not in the Block have been removed.

 **Challenge/Competition Block** :  
 **Stacked with:** Houses Competition (Term 3); MC4A  
 **House** : Hufflepuff  
 **Year:** 6th  
 **Category:** Additional (3228-3338 words)  
 **Prompt:** Feature a Next Gen Character  
 **Representation:** Magic; Learning to be a parent; Harry Potter; Slice of Life; Saviors/Parents; Makeshift Family; Andromeda Black Tonks  
 **Bonus Challenges:** Creature Feature; Second Verse (Nontraditional; Found Family; Rediscovery; Wabi Sabi; Not a Lamp; Ladylike - Ambitious; Middle Name; Tomorrow's Shade; Some Beach); Second Verse (Misshapen Pods; Hot Apple; Mermaid; Sitting Hummingbird; Toto's Tribute)  
 **Word Count** : 3293

-= LP =-  
Titanic Hearts  
-= LP =-  
"The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" – Edgar Allan Poe  
-= LP =-

Harry noticed them immediately. He did not realize what they were, not in the chaos of those first few minutes. He had more important things to worry about like assuring that he was actually successful in defeating Voldemort and avoiding dying again. He did not want to do that for a long while.

It was only after the battle had ended that Harry spared the odd cords any attention. Even then, they hadn't seemed important. They weren't hurting any of the people or things they were touching. However, there were so many other things that needed his attention like adjusting to suddenly being a parent to a newborn.

Luckily, he had plenty of help. Andromeda had no problem continuing to watch over her grandson while Harry dealt with the dozens of people who demanded his personal help in the aftermath of Voldemort's reign. Kreacher was practically giddy to have a new Black to look after—well, actually, the old elf was as cantankerous as ever, but he was not insulting anyone whose existence would have offended Walburga's _delicate sensibilities_ , which would have been doing daily jigs in just about anyone else, so Harry was not going to complain. Bill and Fleur also helped out, once it became obvious that the bit of wolf that Bill had gained from his not-lycanthropy felt agitated when separated from Teddy for too long. Harry was almost jealous that the feeling seemed reciprocal as Teddy grew fussy if the oldest Weasley son wasn't around.

(He wasn't going to admit to the tiny part of himself which ached at the thought of more family that didn't want _him_. It was an old hurt that he had already reconciled himself to feeling. It didn't bear thinking about more than in passing. Teddy was a _baby_ , not the _Dursleys,_ and neither were any of the people filling the old townhouse to the brim with life and laughter. He was not going to ruin this amazing chance at finally having a family by remembering carrying his own flayed self from a train station betwixt life and whatever came after. He was not going to remember how Teddy weighed more at six months than that mockery of innocent hope had. _He was not_.)

Mrs. Weasley also offered to help with Teddy. Harry had no doubts about her expertise in the realm of childcare. The woman had raised seven children and all of them were magical, which Teddy definitely was if the numerous displays of accidental magic were believed. But Mrs. Weasley had a tendency to take over instead of merely helping. That wasn't what Harry wanted for Teddy. If he managed nothing else in his life, he was going to make sure that Teddy never felt like he had been shuffled off because he was unwanted. His godson was _never_ going to be someone's second choice. Dealing with Mrs. Weasley in first an offended temper and then in tears at being excluded was a small price. Though the wails of how proud she was of his stance as she clutched him tightly was a bit harder to understand.

(Teddy's accidental magic incidents were the reason they were living at the Black residence, as it had special wards to deal with the aggressive childhood displays that Blacks were prone to and Andromeda never could figure out how to replicate said wards. Living at Grimmauld Place let them all avoid the headache of rebuilding entire rooms on a biweekly basis. It wasn't as bad as it had been before Harry had won over Kreacher, who had taken back up his previous tasks with renewed vigor.)

A lot of the outside demands for Harry's attention settled down once the reconstruction of Hogwarts had been completed, allowing for the school to return to its duties to the magical children of the British Isles. Hermione had returned to complete her education, like everyone had expected. The unexpected bit was Mrs. Weasley had convinced both Ron and Ginny to do so as well. Mrs. Weasley had tried to convince Harry as well, but he had refused to leave Teddy for so long and had managed to get her to relent with the promise to continue his studies on his own. The promise had led to another suffocating hug as Mrs. Weasley heaped praise upon him that had set off a crying fit from Teddy.

With the reopening of Hogwarts, the British magical world seemed finally able to start picking up its previous rhythm of life. Kingsley Shacklebolt stayed on as interim Minister of Magic and immediately began pushing for a review of policies and laws created by the previous regime. Any that were found to promote Death Eater ideology were overturned or amended, whichever would better serve the interests of British wizards. To Harry's surprise, Neville became the strongest advocate for change in the Wizengamot, making great use of both his inherited seat in the chamber as the Longbottom heir and his suddenly acquired fame as the man who had faced down Voldemort with nothing but words and a sword pulled from a burning hat.

The revelation that the British custom of nobility had carried over to its magical community had shocked Harry as much as it had enraged Andromeda. No one had mentioned that to him, not even Sirius. At this point, Harry wasn't surprised to learn that Dumbledore had wanted to _spare_ him that burden as well. Since the war had ended, Harry had been finding that Dumbledore's favorite hobby had been keeping secrets. Holding back information that might have been used against their side if it had become known by Voldemort had made sense; keeping the extent of Harry's inheritance from him had not. According to Andromeda, Harry should have been receiving lessons for years to prepare him for taking over the Potter duties at the very least. Since Sirius had made Harry his heir when he had accepted the role as godfather, there was apparently the ones for the House of Black as well.

It had then occurred to Harry that Remus may have had other reasons for choosing him to be Teddy's godfather than faith that Harry would survive the war even if both he and Tonks hadn't. The Blacks had once been the largest of the British Noble Houses. Their powerful progeny had also guaranteed them undisputed dominion when it came to their specialties of martial magic and abjuration. Their numbers had allowed them to marry into almost every family of note in Europe. The House of Black had practically been in charge of the British Isles at the time of Sirius' birth and they had been significant voices in the rest of Europe as well.

But the war with Voldemort had cost them all of that. By the time Teddy had been born, the Blacks consisted of Andromeda and her sisters, Tonks, Draco Malfoy, and surprisingly, Harry himself. It had been luck that Andromeda hadn't been with Ted when the Snatchers had captured him. With the way that the British wizarding world handled the placement of orphans, Teddy could have easily ended up with Death Eaters if Remus hadn't prevented it by making Harry the boy's godfather.

(Apparently, James' mother had been a Black. From all of Andromeda's stories, Dorea Black Potter had been a rather scary woman, though not in the same way that Bellatrix had been. Dorea had been one of the more stable Black women. It was that trait that had allowed her to accomplish as much as she had. Like many Blacks, she had been a Slytherin and her ambition had raised the dying House of Potter back into prominence for a short time. She and her husband Charlus had been killed shortly before Harry's parents had gone into hiding.

Harry didn't want to think about what his life might have been like if he had been raised by such a titan of a witch instead of the Durlseys. Would he had argued so hard with the Sorting Hat? Or would he have accepted the potential of being sent to Slytherin? Maybe she would have encouraged his reading habit instead of punishing him for it like Petunia had, and thus Harry might have gone into Ravenclaw instead. Or maybe she would have instilled a sense of unfailing loyalty to family in him and he would have gone into Hufflepuff. Any of those things would have changed so much of the way the war had gone and Harry didn't want to think about what that meant in terms of the lives that had been lost.)

Life settled into a predictable rhythm as winter crept upon the land. Harry would get up with Teddy who would paint the tray of his highchair with his porridge while making whatever fruit Harry also gave him disappear completely. By the time, Harry managed to clean up the mess, someone else would be up to take over caring for Teddy for a few hours so that Harry could study. He would break for lunch and snuggles with his godson. The seven-month-old was at the point where he snacked off of Harry's lunch a bit but the real meal for him would be the bottle Harry gave him before putting him down for his afternoon nap. Harry would then return to his studies for however long Teddy slept. Once Teddy woke up, they would go to the park across the street for a few hours if the weather was nice or they would do something in the playroom that Kreacher had put together in the room adjacent to both Teddy's nursery and Harry's bedroom. Kreacher would insist on preparing supper for the entire household, and thus all of them would be forbidden from entering the kitchen until he announced that dinner was ready. After dinner, the entire household would gather in either the foyer or the library. They rarely did anything actually as a group, but being in the same room doing their own things felt right to all of them.

(Andromeda had suggested that the ancient elf had acquired help from somewhere and was hiding the source for some reason, but she had also reassured Harry that it was a normal house-elf custom if said helper was very young and not a sign that Kreacher didn't trust them or was trying to poison them all. Harry hadn't thought the latter would have been a potential issue but apparently wasn't that an uncommon a thing for elves to do with masters they truly despised.)

If Fleur didn't have a shift at the bank and wasn't the person who took Teddy, then she would tutor Harry on whatever subject he was studying that day. She wasn't as bossy about it as Hermione had always been either. That didn't mean she wasn't a formidable taskmaster just the same, because she absolutely was. It was just that Fleur didn't expect him to know everything about a subject before sitting down to work on something and her method of helping him work through any confusion was surprising gentle. He would not have expected her to be that kind, given how prone she was to snap at nearly everyone.

She was also very physically affectionate, which was something that Harry loved as much as it confused him. More than once he had found himself leaning into her fleeting brushes of her wrist or cheek against his cheek and had to force himself to pull away lest he start acting like one of the creepy people who threw themselves at the veela. The last thing he wanted was for Fleur to feel the same way about him that she did about Ron's worshipful stares. Well, maybe not the last thing, because he didn't want Bill to think he was trying to make some kind of move on his wife. Harry had seen how quick the curse breaker was to defend Fleur from admirers drawn in by her veela magic, even though she was perfectly capable of doing so herself, and if the same instincts that had made the redhead protective of Teddy happened to be triggered, then Bill was even quicker to step in. Harry didn't want to be a target, true, but more importantly, he didn't want to upset the dynamics of their little family.

He was determined to just enjoy whatever he got for as long as he had it. It was already more than he had ever expected to have. At times, usually in the quieter moments when Teddy had fallen asleep in his arms and he couldn't bring himself to put the baby down yet, Harry thought that maybe he really had died from Voldemort's curse and all of that had followed was nothing more than a version of Heaven where he had everything that he had ever wished while he had laid awake in his cupboard beneath the stairs, too hungry, too cold, and too much in pain to actually fall asleep. As winter turned to spring, Harry found himself fighting the growing worry that he was running out of time to enjoy the makeshift family he had built.

It took Harry longer than it probably should have to realize that the growth of that fear was proportional to the way that the strange cords connected to his loved ones were changing as time went by. Back when Harry had first noticed them, Teddy only had a few thin ones along with a matching number of ones that ended in tatters. All the adults had so many cords that Harry couldn't count them as they had twisted out from them. Unlike Teddy's pale strings, adults often had cords that were deeply saturated with a rainbow of hues. As Teddy grew older, his strings grew with him, looking more like the cords of the adults that surrounded him. But all of Fleur's cords had started developing a pale green tint around Halloween while the cords surrounding both Andromeda and George had been steadily losing their saturation.

Harry was almost certain that the green tint in Fleur's cords was connected to her pregnancy. Just because he had only noticed the color shift towards the end of October didn't mean that it hadn't started before then. It was difficult for Harry to know, really, since from everything he could see, Fleur was sailing through her pregnancy with the same unerring grace that she did everything else in her life. From the books he had been sneak-reading in the middle of the night, the horror stories he had heard about morning sickness and mood swings weren't the guarantee that he had thought from listening to his aunt's bridge club, but other than a steadily growing belly, Fleur didn't seem to pregnant at all. Harry found himself actually looking forward to the impending chaos of having a newborn in the house again. It would give him a chance to repay Bill and Fleur for their help with Teddy in those first few months.

But he didn't like the paling that he saw in the cords that surrounded Andromeda and George. He also didn't like how the two had been acting as the winter had been waning. George had been translating his notes out of the secret code that he and Fred had memorialized all their tricks and pranks in. On the surface, it looked as if he was just bringing Lee Jordan more fully into the shop's business, and that was what he would tell Harry any time he asked, but something about it kept nagging at Harry. It was an itch that refused to go away. Likewise, Andromeda seemed to be growing more determined that Harry understood the traditions and by-laws of the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black. In between lessons, Harry had seen her scribbling away in a thick journal bound in fine dragonhide the color of pitch. He had only seen the cover once and the deep lines of embossing that made up the Black coat of arms with its silver raven with wings spread and talons holding the violet pentacle had made something like a rock settle in his stomach.

In the back of his mind, where he had shoved all the things that he refused to think about, Harry could hear a steady trickle sound like bits of super-fine sand pouring out of one half of an hourglass into another. Time felt like it was going too fast and Harry just wanted it to slow down or maybe even stop.

The Weasleys didn't deserve to face any more losses; Teddy didn't deserve to lose his grandmother after having already losing his parents and grandfather. Harry didn't expect life to ever be fair—the Dursleys had made certain that he had learned that lesson too well for him to ever forget it—but he still didn't want that to happen. It was something which would have been even worse than simply _not fair_. All Harry wanted was for their family to not lose anyone else, at least not for many, many years. They were all still healing from the war. It was slow going, yeah, but it was happening. They didn't need more wounds that needed handling.

But no matter what Harry might want, those cords kept fading, their colors bleeding into the air like water evaporating at under the rising sun. George's hair grew brittle and limp even if his smile stayed fragilely bright. Andromeda's skin took on a thin transparency that made her appear to be becoming even more silvery than the visual aura that constantly surrounded Fleur in the last stages of her pregnancy.

In the same way that life went on after Sirius had died, their deaths seemed as inevitable as the setting of the sun at the end of the day.

The Floo call about George came in the afternoon of the day which would have been his twenty-first birthday. Lee had found him after he had failed to come downstairs to the shop. It looked like he had simply slipped away in his sleep. The Weasleys buried George next to Fred in the family graveyard on Muriel's property. As they had many things in life, the twins shared a headstone and a two-word epitaph that perfectly summed up their trickster natures.

The words _mischief managed_ had never hurt so much as they did carved into the dark granite of that burial marker and disappearing as the sky wept with Mrs. Weasley over the loss of another child.

Andromeda had lasted just long enough to see the birth of Victoire Blanche Weasley on the first anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. The witch had kissed both the newborn and her grandson before she had gone up to bed the night after the elaborate memorial ceremony that had taken place a week after the actual anniversary. Harry had found her when he had gone to wake her the next morning.

In the custom of the Blacks, she was cremated on a pyre made of applewood, and her ashes scattered in the lake on the grounds of Hogwarts. Harry had kept only a tiny vial of the ashes and a lock of her dark hair, both as tokens for Teddy. Unlike the rain that had accompanied George's funeral, the sky had been brilliantly blue and clear for Andromeda's rites. It fit her nonsensical nature.

Harry hoped that he would do even half as well raising Teddy as Andromeda had Tonks.

It was the best way he could think of to remember such a titan of a witch.

His heart still ached.

-= LP =-  
An Ending  
-= LP =-


End file.
